Exporting content under legal hold for eDiscovery

Box Governance includes the ability to “legally hold” specified content and preserve it until it can be either exported and reviewed or deleted. Box legal hold capabilities are crucial to an organization's eDiscovery process. More about legal holds in Box Governance.

The diagram below shows where Box fits in an organization's eDiscovery process. Box preserves all content placed on legal hold until an organization decides whether it must review and analyze that content. At that point, an organization can export the content from Box and then use a variety of tools and processes to review, analyze, and present it.

It’s critical for any content export to be accurate and complete; otherwise an organization might not be fulfilling its legal obligations, potentially exposing itself to serious financial and/or regulatory penalties.

Four methods enable you to export contents under a Box legal hold:

1. Box legal hold export feature
2. eDiscovery partner
3. Box content manager
4. Box API custom script

Each organization should review and understand its eDiscovery requirements and select the most appropriate option. Details and limitations of each method is below.

Option 1: Using the Box legal hold export feature to export content

To use the Box legal hold export feature, see this article.

Option 2: Using an eDiscovery partner to export content

You can use one of the third-party organizations with whom Box maintains a partnership to analyze exported data. A seamless integration with each partner enables automatic uploading of content, after which you can manage the content through the remainder of your organization's eDiscovery processes, such as relevance modeling and culling.

Choose from one of five eDiscovery partners (as of August, 2022):

1. Onna
2. Relativity
3. Exterro
4. Logikcull
5. IPro

Considerations:

• Be sure to review each integration with your vendor, to ensure you understand how the integration will behave and whether such behavior meets your organization's e-Discovery requirement.
• Regardless of which partner you choose, we strongly recommend you use the primary Box Administrator account for authentication purposes. This ensures access to all content in the environment.

Option 3: Using a content manager to export content

If you are an admin or co-admin of your organization’s Box account, you can use the Content Manager within the Box Admin Console to access any individual’s files and folders. Using the Content Manager enables you to filter on a specific person and view that person’s folder structure from their perspective. You can then extract the content you want from that person’s account. Here’s how:

To extract content using the Box Content Manager

1. From your Admin Console, navigate to Content > Content Manager
2. Search for the user whose content is under legal hold.
3. Next to More, click the check mark to select all folders you wish to export
4. Click Download. The files within those folders download as a ZIP file.

Limitations:

• You can only do this one individual at a time.
• Using the Content Manager exports all content in the selected folder.
• You cannot export any content from the trash (except via the Box API).
• You get only the latest version of each file.
• There is a 15 GB limit for downloads.

Option 4: Using a custom script to export content

Organizations can export content from Box in any way they wish through Box’s APIs. Get more information on API endpoints for Legal Holds, as well as Box's robust set of APIs.